Three Seigneurs of Old Canada, Hebert, La
Durantaye, Le Moyne

It was to the seigneurs that the king looked for
active aid in promoting the agricultural interests of New France.
Many of them disappointed him, but not all. There were seigneurs
who, in their own way, gave the king's interests a great deal of
loyal service, and showed what the colony was capable of doing if
all its people worked with sufficient diligence and zeal. Three of
these pioneers of the seigneuries have been singled out for special
attention in this chapter, because each prefigures a type of
seigneur who did what was expected of him, although not always in
the prescribed way. Their work was far from being showy, and offers
a writer no opportunity to make his pages glow. The priest and the
trader afford better themes. But even the short and simple annals of
the poor, if fruitful in achievement, are worth the recounting.

The honor of being the colony's first seigneur belongs to Louis
Hebert, and it was a curious chain of events
that brought him to the role of a yeoman in the St Lawrence valley.
Like most of these pilgrim fathers of Canada, Hebert has left to
posterity little or no information concerning his early life and his
experience as tiller of virgin soil. That is a pity; for he had an
interesting and varied career from first to last. What he did and
what he saw others do during these troublous years would make a
readable chronicle of adventure, perseverance, and ultimate
achievement. As it is, we must merely glean what we can from stray
allusions to him in the general narratives of early colonial life.
These tell us not a tithe of what we should like to know; but even
such shreds of information are precious, for Hebert was Canada's
first patron of husbandry. He connected his name with no brilliant
exploit either of war or of peace; he had his share of adventure,
but no more than a hundred others in his day; the greater portion of
his adult years were passed with a spade in his hands. But he
embodies a type, and a worthy type it is.

Most of Canada's early settlers came from Normandy, but Louis Hebert
was a native of Paris, born in about 1575. He had an apothecary's
shop there, but apparently was not making a very marked success of
his business when in 1604. he fell in with Biencourt de Poutrincourt,
and was enlisted as a member of that voyageur's first expedition to
Acadia. It was in these days the custom of ships to carry an
apothecary or dispenser of health-giving herbs. His functions ran
the whole gamut of medical practice from copious blood-letting to
the dosing of sailors with concoctions of mysterious make. Not
improbably Hebert set out with no intention to remain in America;
but he found Port Royal to his liking, and there the historian
Lescarbot soon found him not only 'sowing corn and planting vines,'
but apparently 'taking great pleasure in the cultivation of the
soil.' All this in a colony which comprised five persons, namely,
two Jesuit fathers and their servant, Hebert, and one other.

With serious dangers all about, and lack of support at home, Port
Royal could make no headway, and in 1613 Hebert made his way back to
France. The apothecary's shop was re-opened, and the daily customers
were no doubt regaled with stories of life among the wild aborigines
of the west. But not for long. There was a trait of restlessness
that would not down, and in 1616 the little shop again put up its
shutters. Hebert had joined Champlain in the Brouage navigator's
first voyage to the St Lawrence. This time the apothecary burned his
bridges behind him, for he took his family along, and with them all
his worldly effects. The family consisted of his wife, two
daughters, and a young son. The trading company which was backing
Champlain's enterprise promised that Hebert and his family should be
paid a cash bonus and should receive, in addition to a tract of
land, provisions and stores sufficient for their first two years in
the colony. For his part, Hebert agreed to serve without pay as
general medical officer of the settlement, to give his other
services to the company when needed, and to keep his hands out of
the fur trade. Nothing was said about his serving as legal officer
of the colony as well; but that task became part o his varied
experience. Not long after his arrival at Quebec, Hebert's name
appears, with the title of procureur du Roi, at the foot of a
petition sent home by the colonists to the king.

All this looked fair enough on its face, but as matters turned out,
Hebert made a poor bargain. The company gave him only half the
promised bonus, granted him no title to any land, and for three
years insisted upon having all his time for its own service. A man
of ordinary tenacity would have made his way back to France at the
earliest opportunity. But Hebert was loyal to Champlain, whom he in
no way blamed for his bad treatment. At Champlain's suggestion he
simply took a piece of land above the settlement at Quebec, and
without waiting for any formal title-deed began devoting all his
spare hours to the task of getting it cleared and cultivated. His
small tract comprised only about a dozen arpents on the heights
above the village; and as he had no one to help him the work of
clearing it moved slowly. Trees had to be felled and cut up, the
stumps burned and removed, stones gathered into piles, and every
foot of soil upturned with a spade. There were no ploughs in the
colony at this time. To have brought ploughs from France or to have
made them in the colony would have availed nothing, for there were
no horses at Quebec. It was not until after the sturdy pioneer had
finished his lifework that ploughs and horses came to lessen the
labor of breaking new land.

Nevertheless, Hebert was able by unremitting industry to get the
entire twelve arpents into cultivable shape within four or five
years. With his labors he mingled intelligence. Part of the land was
sown with maize, part sown with peas, beans, and other vegetables, a
part set off as an orchard, and part reserved as pasture. The land
was fertile and produced abundantly. A few head of cattle were
easily provided for in all seasons by the wild hay which grew in
plenty on the flats by the river. Here was an indication of what the
colony could hope to do if all its settlers were men of Hebert's
persistence and stability. But the other prominent men of the little
settlement, although they may have turned their hands to gardening
in a desultory way, let him remain, for the time being, the only
real colonist in the land. On his farm, moreover, a house had been
built during these same years with the aid of two artisans, but
chiefly by the labor of the owner himself. It was a stone house,
about twenty feet by forty in size, a one-story affair,
unpretentious and unadorned, but regarded as one of the most
comfortable abodes in the colony. The attractions of this home, and
especially the hospitality of Madame Hebert and her daughters, are
more than once alluded to in the meager annals of the settlement. It
was the first dwelling to be erected on the plateau above the
village; it passed to Hebert's daughter, and was long known in local
history as the house of the widow Couillard. Its exact situation was
near the gate of the garden which now encircles the seminary, and
the remains of its foundation walls were found there in 1866 by some
workmen in the course of their excavations.

That strivings so worthy should have in the end won due recognition
from official circles is not surprising. The only wonder is that
this recognition was so long delayed. An explanation can be found,
however, in the fact that the trading company which controlled the
destinies of the colony during its precarious infancy was not a bit
interested in the agricultural progress of New France. It had but
two aims--in the first place to get profits from the fur trade, and
in the second place to make sure that no interlopers got any share
in this lucrative business. Its officers placed little value upon
such work as Hebert was doing. But in 1623 the authorities were
moved to accord him the honor of rank as a seigneur, and the first
title-deed conveying a grant of land en seigneurie was issued to him
on February 4 of that year. The deed bore the signature of the Duc
de Montmorenci, titular viceroy of New France. Three years later a
further deed, confirming Hebert's rights and title, and conveying to
him an additional tract of land on the St Charles river, was issued
to him by the succeeding viceroy, Henri de Levy, Duc de Ventadour.

The preamble of this document recounts the services of the new
seigneur. 'Having left his relatives and friends to help establish a
colony of Christian people in lands which are deprived of the
knowledge of God, not being enlightened by His holy light,' the
document proceeds, 'he has by his painful labors and industry
cleared lands, fenced them, and erected buildings for himself, his
family and his cattle.' In order, accordingly, 'to encourage those
who may hereafter desire to inhabit and develop the said country of
Canada,' the land held by Hebert, together with an additional square
league on the shore of the St Charles, is given to him 'to have and
to hold in fief noble for ever,' subject to such charges and
conditions as might be later imposed by official decree.

By this indenture feudalism cast its first anchor in the New World.
Some historians have attributed to the influence of Richelieu this
policy of creating a seigneurial class in the transmarine dominions
of France. The cardinal-minister, it is said, had an idea that the
landless aristocrats of France might be persuaded to emigrate to the
colonies by promises of lavish seigneurial estates wrested from the
wilderness. It will be noted, however, that Hebert received his
title-deed before Richelieu assumed the reins of power, so that,
whatever influence the latter may have had on the extension of the
seigneurial system in the colonies, he could not have prompted its
first appearance there.

Hebert died in 1627. Little as we know about his life, the clerical
chroniclers tell us a good deal about his death, which proves that
he must have had all the externals of piety. He was extolled as the
Abraham of a new Israel. His immediate descendants were numerous,
and it was predicted that his seed would replenish the earth.
Assuredly, this portion of the earth needed replenishing, for at the
time of Hebert's death Quebec was still a struggling hamlet of
sixty-five souls, two-thirds of whom were women and children unable
to till the fields. Hebert certainly did his share. His daughters
married in the colony and had large families. By these marriages a
close alliance was formed with the Couillards and other prominent
families of the colony's earliest days. From these and later
alliances some of the best-known families in the history of French
Canada have come down,--the Jolliets, De Lerys, De Ramesays,
Fourniers and Taschereaus,--and the entire category of Hebert's
descendants must run well into the thousands. All but unknown by a
busy world outside, the memory of this Paris apothecary has none the
less been cherished for nearly three hundred years in many a
Canadian home. Had all the seigneurs of the old regime served their
king with half his zeal the colony would not have been left in later
days so naked to its enemies.

But not all the seigneurs of Old Canada were of Hebert's type. Too
many of them, whether owing to inherited Norman traits, to their
previous environment in France, or to the opportunities which they
found in the colony, developed an incurable love of the forest life.
On the slightest pretext they were off on a military or trading
expedition, leaving their lands, tenants, and often their own
families to shift as best they might. Fields grew wild while the
seigneurs, and often their habitants with them, spent the entire
spring, summer, and autumn in any enterprise that promised to be
more exciting than sowing and reaping grain. Among the military
seigneurs of the upper St Lawrence and Richelieu regions not a few
were of this type. They were good soldiers and quickly adapted
themselves to the circumstances of combat in the New World, meeting
the Iroquois with his own arts and often combining a good deal of
the red man's craftiness with a white man's superior intelligence.
Insatiable in their thirst for adventure, they were willing to
assume all manner of risks or privations. Spring might find them at
Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the Mississippi, a
trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand miles between.
Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony's annual
balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly
cleared, homes built and harvests stowed safely away. But according
to their own ideals of service they valiantly served the king, and
they furnish the historian of the old regime with an interesting and
unusual group of men. Neither New England nor the New Netherlands
possessed this type within their borders, and this is one reason why
the pages of their history lack the contrast of light and shade
which marks from start to finish the annals of New France.

When the Carignans stepped ashore at Quebec in 1665 one of their
officers was Olivier Morel de la Durantaye,
a captain in the regiment of Campelle, but attached to the
Carignan-Salieres for its Canadian expedition. In the first
expedition against the Mohawks he commanded the advance guard, and
he was one of the small band who spent the terrible winter of
1666-67 at Fort Ste Anne near the head of Lake Champlain, subsisting
on salt pork and a scant supply of moldy flour. Several casks of
reputedly good brandy, as Dollier de Casson records, had been sent
to the fort, but to the chagrin of the diminutive garrison they
turned out to contain salt water, the sailors having drunk the
contents and refilled the casks on their way out from France.
Warlike operations continued to engross Durantaye's attentions for a
year or two longer, but when this work was finished he returned with
some of his brother officers to France, while others remained in the
colony, having taken up lands in accordance with Talon's plans. In
1670, however, he was back at Quebec again, and having married a
daughter of the colony, applied at once for the grant of a seigneury.
This was given to him in the form of a large tract, two leagues
square, on the south shore of the lower St Lawrence, between the
seigneury of Beaumont des Islets and the Bellechasse channel. To
this fief of La Durantaye adjoining lands were subsequently added by
new grants, and in 1674 the seigneur also obtained the fief of
Kamouraska. His entire estate comprised about seventy thousand
arpents, making him one of the largest landowners in the colony.

Durantaye began his work in a leisurely way, and the census of 1681
gives us the outcome of his ten years of effort. He himself had not
taken up his abode on the land nor, so far as can be ascertained,
had he spent any time or money in clearing its acreage. With his
wife and four children he resided at Quebec, but from time to time
he made visits to his holding and brought new settlers with him.
Twelve families had built their homes within the spacious borders of
his seigneury. Their whitewashed cottages were strung along a short
stretch of the river bank side by side, separated by a few arpents.
Men, women, and children, the population of La Durantaye numbered
only fifty-eight; sixty-four arpents had been cleared; and
twenty-eight horned cattle were reported among the possessions of
the habitants. Rather significantly this colonial Domesday of 1681
mentions that the sixteen able-bodied men of the seigneury possessed
'seven muskets' among them. From its situation, however, the
settlement was not badly exposed to Indian assault.

In the way of cleared lands and population the fief of La Durantaye
had made very modest progress. Its nearest neighbor, Bellechasse,
contained two hundred and twenty-seven persons, living upon three
hundred and twenty arpents of cultivable land. With an arsenal of
sixty-two muskets it was better equipped for self-defense. The
census everywhere took more careful count of muskets than of
ploughs; and this is not surprising, for it was the design of the
authorities to build up a 'powerful military colony' which would
stand on its own feet without support from home. They did not seem
to realize that in the long run even military prowess must rest with
that land which most assiduously devotes itself to the arts of
peace.

Ten years later the fief of Durantaye made a somewhat better
showing. The census of 1692 gave it a marked increase in population,
in lands made arable, and in herds of domestic cattle. A house had
been built for the seigneur, whose family occupied it at times, but
showed a preference for the more attractive life at Quebec.
Durantaye was not one of the most prosperous seigneuries, neither
was it among those making the slowest progress. As Catalogne phrased
the situation in 1712, its lands were 'yielding moderate harvests of
grain and vegetables.' Fruit-trees had been brought to maturity in
various parts of the seigneury and were bearing well. Much of the
land was well wooded with oak and pine, a good deal of which had
been already, in 1712, cut down and marketed at Quebec.

Morel de la Durantaye could not resign himself to the prosaic life
of a cultivator. He did not become a coureur de bois like many of
his friends and associates, but like them he had a taste for the
wild woods, and he pursued a career not far removed from theirs. In
1684 he was in command of the fortified trading-post at
Michilimackinac, and he had a share in Denonville's expedition
against the Onondagas three years later. On that occasion he
mustered a band of traders who, with a contingent of friendly
Indians, followed him down to the lakes to join the punitive force.
In 1690 he was at Montreal, lending his aid in the defense of that
part of the colony against raiding bands of Iroquois which were once
again proving a menace. At Boucherville, in 1694, one historian
tells us with characteristic hyperbole, Durantaye killed ten
Iroquois with his own hand. Mohawks were not, as a rule, so easy to
catch or kill. Two years later he commanded a detachment of troops
and militiamen in operations against his old-time foes, and in 1698
he was given a royal pension of six hundred livres per year in
recognition of his services. Having been so largely engaged in these
military affrays, little time had been available for the development
of his seigneury. His income from the annual dues of its habitants
was accordingly small, and the royal gratuity was no doubt a welcome
addition. The royal bounty never went begging in New France. No one
was too proud to dip his hand into the king's purse when the chance
presented itself.

In June 1703 Durantaye received the signal honor of an appointment
to the Superior Council at Quebec, and this post gave him additional
remuneration. For the remaining twenty-four years of his life the
soldier-seigneur lived partly at Quebec and partly at the
manor-house of his seigneurial estate. At the time of his death, in
1727, these landed holdings had greatly increased in population, in
cleared acreage, and in value, although it cannot be said that this
progress had been in any direct way due to the seigneur's active
interest or efforts. He had a family of six sons and three
daughters, quite enough to provide for with his limited income, but
not a large family as households went in those days. Durantaye was
not among the most effective of the seigneurs; but little is to be
gained by placing the various leaders among the landed men of New
France in sharp contrast, comparing their respective contributions
one with another. The colony had work for all to do, each in his own
way.

Among those who came to Montreal in 1641, when the foundations of
the city were being laid, was the son of a Dieppe innkeeper, Charles
Le Moyne by name. Born in 1624, he was only
seventeen when he set out to seek his fortune in the New World. The
lure of the fur trade promptly overcame him, as it did so many
others, and the first few years of his life in Canada were spent
among the Huron in the regions round Georgian Bay. On becoming of
age, however, he obtained a grant of lands on the south shore of the
St Lawrence, opposite Montreal, and at once began the work of
clearing it. This area, of fifty lineal arpents in frontage by one
hundred in depth, was granted to Le Moyne by M. de Lauzon [Footnote:
Jean de Lauzon, at this time president of the Company of One Hundred
Associates, which, as we have seen, had the feudal suzerainty of
Canada. Lauzon was afterwards governor of New France, 1651-56.] as a
seigneury on September 24, 1647.

Despite the fact that his holding was directly in the path of Indian
attacks, Le Moyne made steady progress in clearing it; he built
himself a house, and in 1654, at the age of twenty-eight, married
Mademoiselle Catherine Primot, formerly of Rouen. The governor of
Montreal, M. de Maisonneuve, showed his good will by a wedding gift
of ninety additional arpents. But Le Moyne's ambition to provide for
a rapidly growing family led him to petition the intendant for an
enlargement of his holdings, and in 1672 the intendant Talon gave
him the land which lay between the seigneuries of Varennes and La
Prairie de la Magdelaine. This with his other tract was united to
form the seigneury of Longueuil. Already the king had recognized Le
Moyne's progressive spirit by giving him rank in the noblesse, the
letters-patent having been issued in 1668. On this seigneury the
first of the Le Moynes de Longueuil lived and worked until his death
in 1685.

Charles Le Moyne had a family of eleven sons, of whom ten grew to
manhood and became figures of prominence in the later history of New
France. From Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico their exploits covered
every field of activity on land and sea. [Footnote: These sons were:
(1) Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, born 1656, who succeeded his
father as seigneur and became the first Baron de Longueuil, later
served as lieutenant-governor of Montreal, and was killed in action
at Saratoga on June 8, 1729; (2) Jacques Le Moyne de Ste Helene,
born 1659, who fell at the siege of Quebec in 1690; (3) Pierre Le
Moyne d'Iberville, born in 1661, voyageur to Hudson Bay and the
Spanish Main, died at Havana in 1706; (4) Paul Le Moyne de Maricourt,
born 1663, captain in the marine, died in 1704 from hardships during
an expedition against the Iroquois; (5) Francois Le Moyne de
Bienville, born 1666, intrepid young border-warrior, killed by the
Iroquois in 1691; (6) Joseph Le Moyne de Serigny, born 1668, served
as a youth in the expeditions of his brother to Hudson Bay, died in
1687; (7) Louis Le Moyne de Chateauguay, born 1676, his young life
ended in action at Fort Bourbon (Nelson or York Factory) on Hudson
Bay in 1694; (8) Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, born 1680,
founder of New Orleans, governor of Louisiana, died in Paris, 1767;
(9) Gabriel Le Moyne d'Assigny, born 1681, died of yellow fever at
San Domingo in 1701; (10) Antoine Le Moyne de Chateauguay, born
1683, governor of French Guiana.] What scions of a stout race they
were! The strain of the old Norse rover was in them all. Each one a
soldier, they built forts, founded cities, governed colonies, and
gave their king full measure of valiant service.

The eldest, who bore his father's name and possessed many of his
traits, inherited the seigneury. Soon he made it one of the most
valuable properties in the whole colony. The old manor-house gave
way to a pretentious chateau flanked by four imposing towers of
solid masonry. Its dimensions were, as such things went in the
colony, stupendously large, the structure being about two hundred
feet in length by one hundred and seventy in breadth. The great
towers or bastions were loopholed in such way as to permit a
flanking fire in the event of an armed assault; and the whole
building, when viewed from the river, presented an impressive
facade. The grim Frontenac, who was not over-given to eulogy,
praised it in one of his dispatches and said that it reminded him of
the embattled chateaux of old Normandy. Speaking from the point of
view of the other seigneurs, the cost of this manorial abode of the
Longueuils must have represented a fortune. The structure was so
well built that it remained fit for occupancy during nearly a full
century, or until 1782, when it was badly damaged by fire. A century
later still, in 1882, the walls remained; but a few years afterwards
they were removed to make room for the new parish church of
Longueuil.

Le Moyne did more than build an imposing house. He had the stones
gathered from the lands and used in building houses for his people.
The seigneur's mill was one of the best. A fine church raised its
cross-crowned spire near by. A brewery, built of stone, was in full
operation. The land was fertile and produced abundant harvests. When
Catalogne visited Longueuil in 1712 he noted that the habitants were
living in comfortable circumstances, by reason of the large
expenditures which the seigneur had made to improve the land and the
means of communication. Whatever Charles Le Moyne could gather
together was not spent in riotous living, as was the case with so
many of his contemporaries, but was invested in productive
improvements. That is the way in which he became the owner of a
model seigneury.

A seigneur so progressive and successful could not escape the
attention of the king. In 1698 the governor and the intendant joined
in bringing Le Moyne's services to the favorable notice of the
minister, with the suggestion that it should receive suitable
acknowledgment. Two years later this recognition came in the form of
a royal decree which elevated the seigneury of Longueuil to the
dignity of a barony, and made its owner the Baron de Longueuil. In
recounting the services rendered to the colony by the new baron the
patent mentioned that 'he has already erected at his own cost a fort
supported by four strong towers of stone and masonry, with a
guard-house, several large dwellings, a fine church bearing all the
insignia of nobility, a spacious farmyard in which there is a barn,
a stable, a sheep-pen, a dovecote, and other buildings, all of which
are within the area of the said fort; next to which stands a banal
mill, a fine brewery of masonry, together with a large retinue of
servants, horses, and equipages, the cost of which buildings amount
to sixty thousand livres; so much so that this seigneury is one of
the most valuable in the whole country.' The population of Longueuil,
in the census returns of 1698, is placed at two hundred and
twenty-three.

The new honor spurred its recipient to even greater efforts; he
became one of the first gentlemen of the colony, served a term as
lieutenant-governor at Montreal, and, going into battle once more,
was killed in action near Saratoga in the expedition of 1729. The
barony thereupon passed to his son, the third Charles Le Moyne, born
in 1687, who lived until 1755, and was for a time administrator of
the colony. His son, the third baron, was killed during the Seven
Years' War in the operations round Lake George, and the title
passed, in the absence of direct male heirs, to his only daughter,
Marie Le Moyne de Longueuil who, in 1781, married Captain David
Alexander Grant of the 94th British regiment. Thus the old
dispensation linked itself with the new. The eldest son of this
marriage became fifth Baron de Longueuil in 1841. Since that date
the title has been borne by successive generations in the same
family.

Of all the titles of honor, great and small, which the French crown
granted to the seigneurs of Old Canada, that of the Baron de
Longueuil is the only one now legally recognized in the Dominion.
After the conquest the descendants of Charles Le Moyne maintained
that, having promised to respect the ancient land tenures, the new
British suzerains were under obligation to recognize Longueuil as a
barony. It was not, however, until 1880 that a formal request for
recognition was made to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. The matter was,
of course, submitted to the law officers of the crown, and their
decision ruled the claim to be well grounded. By royal proclamation,
accordingly, the rank and title of Charles Colmore Grant, seventh
Baron de Longueuil, were formally recognized. [Footnote: The royal
recognition was officially promulgated as follows: 'The Queen has
been graciously pleased to recognize the right of Charles Colmore
Grant, Esquire, to the title of Baron de Longueuil, of Longueuil, in
the province of Quebec, Canada. This title was conferred on his
ancestor, Charles Le Moyne, by letters-patent of nobility signed by
King Louis XIV in the year 1700.'-(London Gazette, December 7,
1880.)]

The barony of Longueuil at one time included an area of about one
hundred and fifty square miles, much of it heavily timbered and
almost all fit for cultivation. The thriving towns of Longueuil and
St Johns grew up within its limits in the century following the
conquest. As population increased, much of the land was sold into
freehold; and when the seigneurial system was abolished in 1854 what
had not been sold was entailed. An entailed estate, though not now
of exceeding great value, it still remains.

No family of New France maintained more steadily its favourable
place in the public view than the house of Longueuil. The sons,
grandsons, and great-grandsons of the Dieppe innkeeper's boy were
leaders of action in their respective generations. Soldiers,
administrators, and captains of industry, they contributed their
full share to the sum of French achievement, alike in war and peace.
By intermarriage also the Le Moynes of Longueuil connected
themselves with other prominent families of French Canada, notably
those of Beaujeu, Lanaudiere, and Gaspe. Unlike most of the colonial
noblesse, they were well-to-do from the start, and the barony of
Longueuil may be rightly regarded as a good illustration of what the
seigneurial system could accomplish at its best.

These three seigneurs, Hebert, La Durantaye, and Le Moyne, represent
three different, yet not so very dissimilar types of landed pioneer.
Hebert, the man of humble birth and limited attainments, made his
way to success by unremitting personal labor under great
discouragements. He lived and died a plain citizen. He had less to
show for his life-work than the others, perhaps; but in those
swaddling days of the colony's history his task was greater. Morel
de la Durantaye, the man-at-arms, well born and bred, took his
seigneurial rank as a matter of course, and his duties without much
seriousness. His seigneury had his attention only when opportunities
for some more exciting field of action failed to present themselves.
Interesting figure though he was--an excellent type of a hundred
others--it was well for the colony that not all its seigneurs were
like him in temperament and ways. Le Moyne, the nearest Canadian
approach to the seigneur of Old France in the days before the
Revolution, combined the best qualities of the other two. There was
plenty of red blood in his veins, and to some of his progeny went
more of it than was good for them. He was ready with his sword when
the occasion called. An arm shot off by an Iroquois flintlock in
1687 gave him through life a grim reminder of his combative habits
in early days. But warfare was only an avocation; the first fruits
of the land absorbed his main interest throughout the larger part of
his days. Each of these men had others like him, and the peculiar
circumstances of the colony found places for them all. The seigneurs
of Old Canada did not form a homogeneous class; men of widely
differing tastes and attainments were included among them. There
were workers and drones; there were men who made a signal success as
seigneurs, and others who made an utter failure. But taken as a
group there was nothing very commonplace about them, and it is to
her two hundred seigneurs or thereabouts that New France owes much
of the glamour that marks her tragic history.

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Chronicles of Canada, The Seigneurs of Old
Canada, A Chronicle of New World Feudalism, 1915